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Books, Music, Movies, Art, Politics, Sex, OtherSun, 02 Aug 2015 16:50:32 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.1.2Collected Poems by Ron Padgetthttp://therumpus.net/2014/01/collected-poems-by-ron-padgett/
http://therumpus.net/2014/01/collected-poems-by-ron-padgett/#commentsFri, 17 Jan 2014 15:00:04 +0000http://therumpus.net/?p=122740Collected Poems today in Rumpus Poetry.]]>There is a kind of progression in Ron Padgett’s Collected Poems that, while difficult to articulate, feels as easy as breathing, as light as a Bonnard interior, as campy and commonplace as a Wayne Thiebaud breakfast, and as naturally wonderful as a Hanukah present from your aunt Gertrude. For example, a friend recently presented me with an orange short-haired cat named Crush. I’d never had a cat before. And so, while having Crush hasn’t changed my life, it has, in a way, because Crush makes the harder moments more endurable. I’m thinking of times when he bounds up to me and kisses me in his own way with his cheek; also, more generally, mornings where waking up isn’t a chore, (even if it is), and the toast and the coffee feel almost reverent and playful in their irreverence. There are all these unforced instances when life is neither spattered over with a tight-fisted ideology nor witnessed with our daily horse blinders on, when something is seen, witnessed, participated in – something special, funny, lovely, warm, absurd, modest, ambitious, whimsical, meaningful. Padgett’s poems are full of these moments – not chestnut instances that make you squeamish with cheesiness, but rather hilarious and untapped times that make you giddy with delight. His Collected Poems constitutes an important 20th and 21st century chronicling of these “ah!” or “huh!” or “yee Gads, wow” experiences – times when we allow ourselves to day-dream and imagine, lose ourselves pleasurably in a funny reverie, play with our cat or dog or strange hamster named “Edgar,” joke with a loved one, or notice something familiar in a new, refreshing light.

Confession: I was initially going to argue that Padgett’s progression is analagous to Frank O’Hara’s, beginning with his wildly innovative, parataxic and associational poems, and ending with poems with at least one foot in narrative; but this formulation kind of falls apart, like a soggy card castle. There is less a sense of Padgett shucking off the yoke of the New York poem to “FIND HIS VOICE,” (a notion Padgett would probably be uncomfortable with – see his poem “Voice”) as there is of the poet experimenting and learning different and new ways of making the New York poem, and poetry more generally, his own. The process or accretion of reading through Padgett’s poems, then, is just as much psychological as literary – we become aware that we are reading not only the work of a poet, but the work of a whole zany person as well, who is documenting through his poetry the individual and unique process of growing up and aging. What’s amazing about Padgett’s poems is that this process, as David Lehman has pointed out, feels so much fun, and also natural, while also, at times, sad and touching. It’s a privilege to read these poems.

So what is a Padgett poem like? Often there is the sense of an imagination stretching itself to explore what Padgett calls in one poem “alternative events”– many Padgett poems do this in wackily innovative ways. For one of many examples, here is “Poema del City,” from his third book, Toujours L’Amour – incidentally, the book in which Padgett seems to hit his stride, not sounding like the stereotypical New York poet, (dazzling but sometimes slightly tiring), but more like (gulp) himself.

Poema del City

I live in the city.It’s a tough life,often unpleasant, sometimesdownright awful, But it has whatwe call its compensations.

To kill a roach, for example,is to my mind not pleasantbut it does develop one’s reflexes.Wham!and that’s that.Sometimes, though, the battered roachwill haul itself onto broken legs and,wildly waving its bent antennae,stagger off into the darkness

to warn the others, who live in the shadowof the great waterfall in their little teepees.Behind them rise the gleaming brown and blue massof the Grand Tetons, topped with white snowthat blushes, come dawn, and glows, come dusk.Silent gray wisps rise from the smouldering campfires.

Notice in the third stanza, how there is a sudden break, a departure that takes us into the literal land of the unexpected. I love that last line, how it spins us into an adventure beyond our expectations and assumptions, and does so with a kind of hilarious, quiet grace. I love, too, how the poem, while ostensibly about the “compensations” of stomping on roaches, is also about the compensations of reading good poetry – i.e. leading us somewhere, only to turn the lights off pleasantly and introduce something we hadn’t foreseen at all, like a moving movie or puppet play. Many of Padgett’s poems are like that – they are these kinds of recipes for one way of writing a poem, i.e. beginning with something, anything, and then letting your imagination seize this something and see where it takes you – a cup of coffee, a memory, an irrational fear, an arrangement of materials on a desk.

And that’s the thing – for while Padgett is often guarding himself against taking himself too seriously, he at the same time evinces a desire to take himself seriously, but through the “smaller” moments that he gets down on paper. And he succeeds, wildly. Here is “Tennyson Invincible,” also from Toujours L’Amour:

Where is the poem “Tennyson Invincible”I’ve been wanting to write for almost two years?It seems to existin a world continuous but not contiguouswith minelike an alternative to an event:I ate a larger bowl of cerealthis morning and wasn’t killed by that speeding taxi!Inside the taxi a passenger staresglumly into the futurewhich the past absorbs as heleads his life through it.Pretty soon poofNo Nothing. A thousandyears pass. An animalwith a shiny white ball for a headdeclaims, through strange body vibrations,“Tennyson Invincible.” Thisof course will not happen –just a fantasy I had.

I love the word “glumly” in the tenth line, its almost onomatopoeia-like quality, close to “poof,” and its juxtaposition to the funny and banal inclusion in the poem about “eating a larger bowl of cereal.” But is it banal? On one level, yes; our morning rituals do not normally bespeak of the extraordinary. But on another level, I think Padgett’s inclusion of his breakfast cereal in the poem is an important swerve away from the imagined and desired poem “Tennyson Invincible” (hilarious title), away from the more cooked poetics of a Lowell, or even of a Tennyson or Wordsworth, and towards a claiming of subject matter that is normally considered too “trite,” too “unimportant,” too “un-epical.” That is, I have the same impression, reading this poem, that I had seeing a painting by Thiebaud of a “roast beef dinner” at the Toledo Museum of Art: I thought instantly to myself, “yes, why not?” And then, “how wonderful!”

And these poems are wonderful, but not just because they are funny and brilliantly light-hearted, or because they take themselves seriously while not taking themselves seriously; they are also wonderful in the way in which they handle pathos. Rather than explain right away, here is “Little Elegy,” from You Never Know:

Blaise Cendrars in his final days, oldand ill, wrote down his final words:This morning on the windowsill a bird.I find that so beautiful and movingI can barely stand it, thoughit makes me see the aged poet, headturned towards the window and a small birdperched there, staring in, angling its headat the bulbous nose and squinty eyes:I have come to visit you, old man.But now I’ll lift my wings and they will beat,for flying is my great thrill,and where the wings sprout outis calling me to leap and fly.Goodbye.Morning, windowsill, and birdall flown away. Goodbye, goodbye.

In this small lyric is encapsulated so much: a meditation on mortality, (although “mortality” in the context of this poem feels too heavy, even bathetic), on poetry, on somehow living everyday and learning to say goodbye everyday to everything we love and cherish, but doing this in a way that is also beautiful and artful and poignant. The poem validates for us every time we have been moved by a work of art so much that we “barely stand it,” how we leave such experiences thankful, changed, charged, quiet, and somehow powerfully sad; or as Padgett writes with sighing emphatic candor, “and it takes your breath away. / It takes your breath away.”

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]]>http://therumpus.net/2014/01/collected-poems-by-ron-padgett/feed/0Reveal: All Shapes and Sizes by Bruce Coveyhttp://therumpus.net/2013/07/reveal-all-shapes-and-sizes-by-bruce-covey/
http://therumpus.net/2013/07/reveal-all-shapes-and-sizes-by-bruce-covey/#commentsSat, 13 Jul 2013 14:00:21 +0000http://therumpus.net/?p=116461Reveal: All Shapes and Sizes today in Rumpus Poetry.]]>What does it mean to write a poem in the 21st century? Put it another way: What is it about the conditions of the 21st century that makes writing a poem – an artifact of language – different than, say, the 20th or the 19th century? How do we write poems in the wake of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations or Richard Rorty’s Contingency, Irony and Solidarity? I ask these questions, not because I have a clear answer, but because any poet writing today, in the wake of the work of Wittgenstein, of Rorty, not to mention John Ashbery (pioneer in the exploration of the relationship between culture, experience and language) and, say, Kenneth Goldsmith’s conceptual poetics (pioneer in the relationship between same), must take these issues into account – or cannot help but take them into account, as much of these changes seem just as unconscious as conscious. Indeed, at the risk of sounding banal, the existence of Google automatically means the existence of a different kind of poetry, for the existence of Google means we have a different repertoire for coping with the world. And this dynamic is not just a matter of aesthetic taste; when culture changes, poetry (duh!) changes. For poetry is the heightened exploration of culture through language. Thus: if you’d like to see what these changes entail, pick up a copy of Bruce Covey’s Reveal: All Shapes & Sizes. This is a book that we ignore at our own peril.

To get us started, here is Covey’s “Note From the Author”, on the last page of the book:

Reveal: All Shapes & Sizes is my fifth book of poetry[…] I began each poem by creating a cluster of keywords; I then completed each line with an “I’m Feeling Lucky” google search on that line’s keyword. Each line, in other words, had a different vocabulary pallet (and often different rules for construction), although I quickly found that the pallets for each poem overlapped. My inspiration for the sequence’s concept and process were John Cage and Ted Berrigan.

This is a recipe for indignation from stuffy naysayers who wish to keep our poetry pure and unblemished from culture. But let us let them write their crappy Romantic poems; the rest of us, who know that poetry is culture, who know that culture is (in part, at least) language, and that language is largely contingent and therefore, in a big way, aleatory, might take this opportunity to be pleasantly surprised. For indeed, one cannot help but say, What a cool idea! Why not compose poems with lines that end with a word from an “I’m Feeling Lucky” Google search? Indeed, such a thought experiment will then raise some fascinating questions, one being, What is the relationship between culture and language?

William James, one of the founders of pragmatism, and therefore one of the figures, like Wittgenstein and Rorty, who can help us understand 21st poetry, wrote in his massive and shockingly seminal and prescient Principles of Psychology that,

If I recite a, b, c, d, e, f, g, at the moment of uttering d, neither a, b, c, nor e, f, g, are out of my consciousness altogether, but both, after their respective fashions, ‘mix their dim lights’ with the stronger one of the d, because their neuroses are both awake in some degree. (257)

James coined the terms “psychic overtone, suffusion, or fringe, to designate the influence of a faint brain-process upon our thought, as it makes it aware of relations and objects but dimly perceived.” (258) And isn’t this what Covey means by a “vocabulary pallet”? Isn’t this also what Ashbery makes us aware of – i.e. the interstices between our thoughts? And in doing so, can we say that Ashbery and Covey thereby enlarge our experience, by enlarging our sense of what language can do? But how does such an exploration in thought and feeling manifest in the poem itself? (And is this what Harold Bloom meant when he coined the term “Shakespeare’s invention of the human?”)

Here’s the first poem in Covey’s collection, “Reveal 1: Planet”:

Mercury: Take a look at where we’re headedVenus: There’s a lot you can see with very modest equipmentEarth: You’ll come across a page which explains how to proceedMars: Looking for information about spirit and opportunityJupiter: Access limited to clients and guest usersSaturn: Take a closer look at the vehicles aboveUranus: The important thing is not to stop questioningNeptune: In the long run met hit at only what they aimPluto: Mapping out a strange, curly path of light and darkSedna: The comets we see are strong evidence

As you can see, Covey begins with a constellation of words – here, no pun intended, a list of planets. There are 161 “Reveals,” and each one involves a different matrix of words, a kind of logical conceptual network, such as (chosen at random), “Quark” (“Up,” “Down,” “Strange,” “Charmed,” “Bottom, “Top,”), “Freud” (“Id,” “Ego,” “Superego”), “Spice (“Anise,” “Cardamom,” etc.), “Condiments,” you get the picture. (Covey declines to do this for words without easy constellations: words like “Truth,” “Art,” and “Sex”.) Covey is thus designing his poetic thought-experiment to include the random (“I’m Feeling Lucky” Google search) and the not-so-random (concept constellations). Which is to say, that Covey is essentially providing us with a blueprint or a template for the process of composition itself, which always involves both chance and order, precariousness and balance, or, as James might have it, “flights and perchings.”

But what becomes interesting as we read through Reveal: All Shapes & Sizes is the way Covey, like Wittgenstein and Ashbery, explores language by playing with and presenting language to us. For example, in “Reveal 37:Direction,” we read in the fifth line, “S: Unbiased analysis at your fingertips.” It is the kind of line that the book is filled with, a kind of Covey-ism, similar to an Ashbery-ism or a Ben Marcus-ism, in which a line gestures towards a new way of making sense, thus initiating the age-old literary process in which

1. You read the line.2. The line doesn’t make conventional sense.3. You imagine the line anew.4. The lines makes unconventional sense.5. You are thinking or imagining in a new way.

This process, arguably resuscitated with enormous power by Ashbery, is what many poets today are interested in (not to mention what poets have always been interested in) – poets like Ben Lerner, Tim Donnelly, and many more. These poets and poems are fascinated by the Rortian dictum that “a talent for speaking differently, rather than arguing well, is the chief instrument of cultural change.” For example, here are two excerpts, the first from Ashbery’s “Decoy”, the second a stanza from Lerner’s Mean Free Path, after which we shall return to Covey:

We hold these truths to be self-evident:That ostracism, both political and moral, hasIts place in the twentieth-century scheme of things;That urban chaos is the problem we have been seeing into and seeing into,For the factory, deadpanned by its very existence into aDescending code of values, has moved right across the road from total financial upheavalAnd caught regression head-on.

For total war, the memory of jasminePaired organs allow us to experienceContradiction without contradictionFlowering in winter. Is my answer audibleOr mine, whatever it might meanRelative to scattering, or am I quotingThe formant frequencies of anchorsWhat I cannot say. I stand for everythingLike money changing hands in dreams

As you can see, these poets (Covey included) are gesturing in new ways towards different ways of making sense – through satire, through new uses of language. In this sense (at the risk of sounding naively optimistic) they are changing our culture, because they are changing our language; in the process of doing so, they are, like Whitman, re-describing what democracy means. But even if Lerner and Covey are doing something similar – re-describing poetry, re-describing language, through satire, through imagination – their strategies for doing so are very different, though they derive, to a large extent, from Ashbery, who is undoubtedly (and proverbially) the single most influential poet of at least the last 50 years. So if Ashbery re-describes poetry through the changing vivacity of his ideas, the preternatural florabundance of his particular stream(s) of consciousness, Lerner does so in Mean Free Path through a taut weaving and re-weaving of words and ideas that repeat themselves throughout the book. Ashbery seems more temporally inclined, Lerner (in Mean Free Path) more spatially. But these are only matter of emphasis. And it’s interesting to note, because Covey is a fascinating blend of the temporal and the spatial, of lines that spin or spit out unconventional sense like a poetic slot machine, even as these lines are intended to cohere in a spatially oriented conceptual framework that provides a kind of aleatory unity to the fun that ensues. Covey also, like Lerner and Ashbery, possesses a strange kind of irony that is hard to place and which borders on neutrality, an irony and even worldview that can be found in figures such as Warhol and John Clare, not to mention a quality that inheres in Google itself, as well as in programming language, in terms of their technological seeming-objectivity (neutrality being a seeming goal of any desired objectivity). Here’s another Covey poem, chosen somewhat at random, in the spirit of Covey; the poem is called “Reveal115: Pattern”:

Stripe: Check out some other models in the pictureSolid: To ensure they are not communicating with strangersSpot: What does this phone number spell?Plaid: Her head nestled in lemons at heaven’s doorPaisley: A pickle, a pear, a mango or a twisted raindropHerringbone: Or, if not, just get measured up correctlyCheck: 66% suffer internal attacksGeometric: For solid edge joins solid edgeAbstract: Eeny, meeny, miny, mo

As you can see, Covey, like Ashbery and Lerner, is enlarging how we imagine language. Bloom was right, I believe; Shakespeare invented us. But the invention continues, I would add. And Covey is one poet helping us to do just that.

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]]>http://therumpus.net/2013/07/reveal-all-shapes-and-sizes-by-bruce-covey/feed/2Uncanny Valley by Jon Woodwardhttp://therumpus.net/2013/04/uncanny-valley-by-jon-woodward/
http://therumpus.net/2013/04/uncanny-valley-by-jon-woodward/#commentsFri, 12 Apr 2013 14:00:32 +0000http://therumpus.net/?p=113227Uncanny Valley today in Rumpus Poetry.]]>What does it mean to understand poetry? There are poems written in the 19th century – by Clare, say, or Keats – that still compel new interpretations. These poems are, however, to a certain extent “representational,” a word I loathe, so use hesitantly, as I’m not sure poems represent anything at all besides other poems. Yet while the poetic texture of a Keats or Clare poem seems forever to allow for new, varied and vivid interpretations, the texture itself seems to gesture towards meaningful parts of lived experience.

In other words, Clare or Keats is not Gertrude Stein. While both are just as intensely interested in language, in what words do on a page, and in bathing the familiar world in an unfamiliar light, I am not sure any poetry before Stein is as autotelic, as disassociated from the world, and as autistically preoccupied with the sound and texture and form and stutter of its own valved voice going where no poem has gone before.

Uncanny Valley by Jon Woodward, the winner of the 2011 Cleveland State University Poetry Center open competition, might be seen in the same light as Stein’s work. For Woodward is not interested in correspondence at all; or, if he is, he wants words to correspond to aspects of our experience that we haven’t thought about yet, or perhaps even imagined. Perhaps it is for this reason that his poems can be very musical, or at least sound-oriented – they have been composed and performed elsewhere along with music – a concert-length piano piece – and I can see why. Music itself is otherworldly, perhaps the strangest, the uncanniest of all the art forms. Occasionally, in Uncanny Valley, one is not sure if one is reading words so much as hearing sounds (what is the difference? Is there one?), an interesting reminder that, at least according to Hard Science Linguistics, what we are experiencing on the page is in fact just that: sound, phonetics, not semantics. Here is an excerpt from the first page of the poems proper, part of a longer poem called “Huge Dragonflies”:

The passage ranges from fascinating to boring to creepy to maddening to puzzling. And it raises the question of interpretation – specifically, what do we do with this? How do we talk about such an object? Do we excavate it for glimmers of meaning? Do we try to take it on its own terms, somehow, someway, without sounding horridly lame? Some combination of the two? Perhaps we simply take it line-by-line. So: “Huge dragonflies aim at your face.” Not the happiest predicament to be in, but even with the first line, we can see how a kind of surreal and sonic landscape opens out. Reading the first line, we might hear the buzzing of the dragonflies just as much as we see them “aiming” at our face. The poem, like the dragonflies, is an assault on our imaginations. When we next read the weirdly ironic, weirdly sincere, baffling “Hope dwells eternally there,” it seems almost like the phrase, in its repetition, is as meaningless, mindless, meaningful, mindful and inevitable as dragonflies flying at one’s face, as advertisements for laundry detergent, as poems interested less in sense and more in sound. One almost imagines a portrait of a face, progressively erased or blocked out by the phrase, “Hope dwells eternally there.” As if one were repeating a phrase over and over again, to experience how the phrase loses its meaning and becomes a sonic object. This interpretation is perhaps not too far-fetched, for we next read, in a line that stutters to hear itself said, “Sound waves define characterist / istics of every interpersonal action.” Yes, we want to say, that’s it! The poem, this poem, is more interested in sound than meaning. But why? Is it because meaning is just that: sound? What are the benefits of such an orientation, and what are the drawbacks?

I suppose the benefits are that you have more leeway to explore that sonic world. You have a new slant towards language, a new way of “making meaning” that is not constrained by semantics, that is only constrained by the acrobatics of the ear. You can be an Elliot Carter of poetry. But what are the drawbacks? These poems can be alienating in their autistic progressions, without supplying the pleasure, say, of an early Ashbery poem. For example, here is the entirety of “Salamander,” a poem that works as a metaphor for the experience of reading the whole collection:

The janitor asked mehow to pronounce the creature’s name& I said salamander for him.

He looked at it on the screenand I looked at him.

Slide your legs into its tail I said.I can’t he said as he did.Feed your guts there into its cavity

of guts, I can’t he said (manifestly untruebecause he did). Mash the thing’sname and yours I said together into

that irreversible hole I know you keepand he did & it broke over his face

& flowed, water from the earth,I can’t, I can’t, he said.

It does not seem too much of a stretch to argue that we, the readers, are the janitor in most of Woodward’s poems in Uncanny Valley. We are the ones who do not know how to pronounce the names. Woodward, the poet, is the one who feeds us the names, the one who says “salamander” for us, and then forces us to contort our understanding in various awkward ways to fit his poetic understanding of the poem, the name, the salamander. What’s unclear is why this serves as Woodward’s poetic template throughout the collection. For who likes to be assaulted with language, or forced into contortions – strict poetic yoga – that are occasionally not the least bit pleasurable, even upon re-reading?

Uncanny Valley consists of twelve poems, five of which are fairly long, so let’s look at another example of a longer poem, from “The Half Horse,” parts of which I consider to be the most successful – the most disturbing yet somehow relatable – in the collection. Here is the first stanza:

The transporter goesWhere the other half of the horseIs hidden. Electric charge flowsThrough the gatewayKeeping it closed throughThe horse where this flank is.It would be a remarkable thing to knowWhere horse muscle does come from.The gateway goes and goes.Money (more money than you’ve ever seen)Keeps it there, but closedIn a round, enclosed roomAnd nothing is seen through it.

The passage, like the excerpt from “Huge Dragonflies” is creepy, yet it’s hard to place the eeriness. One senses a kind of political diabolical activity going in, where a living creature is reduced to an experimental object that is then studied in inhumane ways. In a way, this does not seem too far-fetched from “Salamander,” where we are presented with Woodward’s fascination with another otherworldly creature, and a forced understanding that goes along with it. (The back of the book informs us that Woodward works at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, and the cover contains a strange ectoplasmic cell-like thing with an eyeball looking at us.) The form of the poem itself feels truncated, as if we are not looking at a poem about a devastatingly experimented-upon horse, so much as the still-slightly-breathing carcass of the horse itself. This is a disturbing and somewhat amazing achievement. But many of the poems in the book, while amazing in different ways, often feel too alienating, too interested in their own voices, even if these voices make no sense whatsoever. Rather than being open to varying interpretations, they seem like closed-off spaces, autistic structures, that do not lend themselves to interpretation easily, willfully, pleasurably, difficultly, or otherwise.

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]]>http://therumpus.net/2013/04/uncanny-valley-by-jon-woodward/feed/0Orphan Hours by Stanley Plumlyhttp://therumpus.net/2013/02/orphan-hours-by-stanley-plumly/
http://therumpus.net/2013/02/orphan-hours-by-stanley-plumly/#commentsFri, 01 Feb 2013 15:00:53 +0000http://therumpus.net/?p=110605Like a blue jay, thrush, or white-chested robin, darting in last light into leaves, twigs, or sky – after the rain, say, but before evening falls, when dark follows a darkening, Stanley Plumly’s Orphan Hours shows us moments rife with a startling beauty, terrible with longing.]]>Like a blue jay, thrush, or white-chested robin, darting in last light into leaves, twigs, or sky – after the rain, say, but before evening falls, when dark follows a darkening, Stanley Plumly’s Orphan Hours shows us moments rife with a startling beauty, terrible with longing.

His poems are aware of a cursedly blessed momentariness that, in their unfolding and passing, lead the heart down candle-lit passages of necessary pathos, and the mind (wandering purposely) through meditations of – and on – meaningful, exquisite meaning. “I remember,” he writes in the opening poem, “Lapsed Meadows,”

in Ohio, fields of wastes of nature,lost pasture, fallow clearings, buckwheatand fireweed and broken sparrow nests,especially in the summer, in the fading hilltop sun,when you could lose yourself by simply lying down.

Although, like Keats and Wordsworth, his major themes are nature (birds, trees, wind, mountains, landscapes) and nurture (his family, including especially his mother and father), (he has two poems side-by-side entitled “Nature” and “Nurture,” and the title, “Orphan Hours,” from a fragment of Shelley’s revisions, connotes a kind of Romantic feral child quality), he is also, like any masterful poet, intoxicated by the elixir of words themselves. Thus this passage is a Whitmanesque commentary on the exhilaration of naming, the sublimity of incantatory cataloguing, the matin-like power of the hushed chant.

Plumly, like a soberer Keats or Whitman (he has written a book on Keats), he quietly intoxicates us with his own private mythologies. Boyish and manly, his head and heart hurts, then flutters, and you feel it. He finds compressed phrases and subtle effects that labor under cover of simplicity – “fading hilltop sun,” the slight natural rhyme of “sun” with “down,” the innocent tug of “especially,” the saddened, heart-stirring nostalgia of simply saying “I remember.”

Other times his poetry can be simply crushing. Here is “Sitting Alone in the Middle of the Night”:

Maybe it was summer and I was back home for a whileworking to pay off debts from school, painting whitebarns and long field fences and on off-days baling hay.It was hot then in Ohio and sometimes so dry the cornor the soybeans would fail. I’d get up at two or threein the morning to find my way to the kitchen for waterand he’d be sitting there in a kind of outline,smoking and staring at something far, his eyes by nowlong adjusted to the dark. Mine were just now opening.Nothing would be said, since there was nothing to say.He was dying, he was turning into stone. The littleI could see I could see already how much heavierhe made the air, heavy enough over the days that summeryou could feel in the house the pull of the earth.

Does the “pull of the earth” refer to gravity or the grave? Who is “sitting alone in the middle of the night” – the poet, writing this poem, or his father, refusing to speak? Imagine waking up in the heat of summer at two or three in the morning, stumbling through the house for a glass of water, only to see your father sitting in the kitchen by himself, the light failing, the room humid, not moving or speaking. The poem conveys this feeling of unspoken tension, trauma, and heartbreak very quietly, but more forcefully and forcibly because of its quiet. And the sadness in the line “He was dying, he was turning to stone” – reaching behind the coals of our feelings, setting them aflame. We feel what Plumly calls the heaviness of the moment, what Robert Hayden called “the chronic angers of that house.” Notice also the urgency with which Plumly begins his poem – he knows what’s on his mind, what’s weighing on him, as though he just asked himself, “What was going on with my father and me around this time? What stories do I remember?”

Many of Plumly’s poems located at the beginning of the book, like “The Crows at 3 A.M.”, “The Jay,” “My Lawrence,” (the latter a wonderfully chilling poem about Plumly’s love affair with D.H. Lawrence) proceed through the dance of thesis-antithesis-synthesis, whereby a problem or question is raised, explored in the next stanza or movement, and resolved, with greater complexity, in the resonating finality of the third stanza or movement.

In one of my favorite poems, however, called “Lost Key,” which is sadly too long to quote in its entirety, this strategy towards moving into a greater synthesis is abandoned, for the sake of a kind of cultivated un-finality, whereby hints or clues as images, like lost keys, or a woman glimpsed through a window, or Plumly’s mother, continually surface and sink back into the rich texture of the poem. The poem’s own modus operandi is therefore a metaphor for the process of writing poetry over a lifetime – a kind of ocean, night, and mother unto itself. Thus we read, in the second stanza, “My mother would sit for hours inside silence,” (with echoes of the later “Sitting Alone in the Middle of the Night”), then of “my mother’s / half-moon scar” in the eighth stanza, and then, ending the eighth stanza and beginning the ninth:

The night my mother died she held on to mein order to keep her body upright over depthsabove which lying down means falling.Outside, the crystal skeletal snow was falling,while in the wind that starts from the groundit would suddenly rise. The sky was nothing,but fifteen floors below carlights under the streetlightsslowed, the midnight into early morning passed,and windows seemed so sheer they opened on the cold.

There is something marvelously haunting about this passage. It is as if the room in which Plumly sits, attending to his dying mother, has taken on the qualities of lucid austerity that attend his own mother’s consciousness during her final breaths. The rising and falling movements – between life and death, wind and snow, carlights and streetlights and sky, morning and midnight, inhalation and exhalation – echo masterfully the poem’s own movement and form of surfacing and sinking.

Then there are the poems that proceed by a kind of breathless desire to tell, to remember, to chronicle. We might end with the final poem of the book, a devastatingly inspired lyric, but I don’t want to give too much away. Therefore, let’s end with the third-to-last poem, called On the Beach at Duck,” short enough for a book review, long enough to stay with us:

The almost gray brown pelicans flying in from nowhere,and as far as the eye can see flying out to nowhere,though they do it to perfection in formationabove the invisible lines drawn perfectly in sandand in the inching blowback waves measuring the shore,since once inside the wind they hardly move their wings,except to readjust or sometimes change the leader,until once inside the light they’re gone.

The poem is just short enough to document the brilliant image of a flock of pelicans, flying into and out of sight, over a twilit beach. Yet it also reminds us of what it is like to be inside one of Plumly’s soaring constructions. The description of “once inside the wind they hardly move their wings” is beautiful, and not less so because it is accurate. We might say the experience of reading Plumly is also often a breathlessly moving experience.

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]]>http://therumpus.net/2013/02/orphan-hours-by-stanley-plumly/feed/0In Beauty Bright by Gerald Sternhttp://therumpus.net/2013/01/in-beauty-bright-by-gerald-stern/
http://therumpus.net/2013/01/in-beauty-bright-by-gerald-stern/#commentsWed, 16 Jan 2013 15:00:26 +0000http://therumpus.net/?p=109922Having never read Gerald Stern’s poetry before, I took This Time: New and Selected Poems out from the library. The book won the National Book Award in 1998, and it deserves it; the poems are consistently charming, witty, disarmingly beautiful, and full of a kind of tongue-in-cheek, Eastern European wisdom and worldliness that seems part Isaac Bashevis Singer, and part Lenny Bruce.]]>Having never read Gerald Stern’s poetry before, I took This Time: New and Selected Poems out from the library. The book won the National Book Award in 1998, and it deserves it; the poems are consistently charming, witty, disarmingly beautiful, and full of a kind of tongue-in-cheek, Eastern European wisdom and worldliness that seems part Isaac Bashevis Singer, and part Lenny Bruce. Open the book up to any page, and you find lines with a wonderfully eclectic, intellectual-curmudgeonly, brutally wild music that brings to mind the marvelously manic antics of an intelligently bawdy grandfather or sophisticated, dirty-joke telling uncle. Perhaps the best compliment I can pay the book is that it motivated me to return to my own practice of writing poetry – one of the best tests I have found for the worth of a book of poems.

I’m beginning this review with praise, because I found Stern’s latest book, In Beauty Bright, interesting as an experiment in form, but somewhat disappointing. The poems are much less punctuated than those in This Time; also, the majority of poems in In Beauty Bright comprise one breathlessly unwinding sentence. Yet it isn’t clear to me why Stern opted for this quirky formal challenge. The poems indeed feel breathless – one feels oneself working to catch up with the poem, to find oneself in the un-comma’d pauses, to locate one’s feet in the burrows of the meter – and yet it is not a breathlessness akin to W.S. Merwin’s whisper, where silence creeps into the pauses to lend much of his poems an eerie, Dickinsonian motionlessness.

Stern has been compared to Whitman, which I think is right, but these late poems do not feel exuberant so much as quietly nostalgic, and this at times jars disconcertingly with the breathless pace with which they introduce themselves and perform. Stern has a certain tender toughness that reminds me of Philip Levine, and his interest in surrealism also suggests some of Levine’s earlier work. Yet Levine, in his late work, deepens into a kind of urban Keats, without losing the toughness. Stern’s poems, at least here, do not suggest such a deepening, but rather casually shuffle across the page with their characteristic whimsy and celebration of human foibles. Yet sometimes they seem to err on the side of toughness, and other times on the side of tenderness.

At their best, they suggest a man on a bench, in coat and hat, feeding pigeons, who, upon entering into a conversation with you, regales you with fascinating, sad, moving and funny stories about his life. At their worst, they suggest the same man snoozing loudly and gutturally on the bench.

My favorite poem in the book was a longer poem called “Two Graces,” though still one breathless sentence, in which Stern re-imagines the two mythological graces as two very Stern-esque intellectuals, Emma Goldmans of 86th street or Eleanor Roosevelts of Central Park. It begins,

There were three but two were all I knewand one was at least a head taller and iftheir writing was different they came from different sidesof the same mountain or for that matter a street,and it was as if the one sang low and the othershrieked almost but that wasn’t true they botheither hummed or sang soprano “Deep River” and atea fish soup there on the corner, and one of the twogrew up in the Bronx and one on 86th streetnot far from Central Park, and one was a free-thinker of the kind in Union Squarethey stood on boxes with a flag protecting themand one went to a progressive school and studiedScotch-Irish songs by traveling through the mountainson a bike and visiting schools and jails

Notice the interesting jump between the eleventh and twelfth lines, where you’d expect a period after “Square.” I like this jump; it suggests a restlessness, a cranky need just to spit out the story, which fits well with Stern’s persona, as if he were saying, “Look, I’m 87 years old. What do you want from me? They ate fish soup, and that’s that.” One can be forgiven for wishing that this acclaimed octogenarian, however, might have invested more of his poems with such an urgency.

One more example. Here is “Rage,” a shorter poem, which, by its very title and form, would suggest a certain exigency – a needfulness to deliver, in its short time and term, a packed punch of pithiness, something to keep our attention pressed up against the poem, following its windings, moves, jolts, surprises. Here’s the poem:

I lost my rage while helping a beetle recoverand stood there with precision, balancinggrass with stone and lifted my stick to showhow dirt holds us up and what is indifferent and whattheir music could be and what the whistling train,according to childhood and ecstatic age.

The poem conveys a certain insouciance, a cultivated laziness, which is risky – one wishes to be seen as freewheeling, perhaps, but obviously not as boring. Yet this poem is, sadly, boring.

It doesn’t matter if the moment upon which the poem is premised seems insignificant – a strong poem can make even the insignificant seem significant. For example, Williams:

so much dependsupon

a red wheelbarrow

glazed with rainwater

beside the whitechickens.

What “Rage” is missing is that “so much depends.” It’s missing that close investigative scrutiny of words that makes a poem a living object. Of course, I’m pretty much preaching to the choir, for Stern can be a marvelous poet. But too many times, in In Beauty Bright, he misses the mark.

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]]>http://therumpus.net/2013/01/in-beauty-bright-by-gerald-stern/feed/0“Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations” by David Ferryhttp://therumpus.net/2012/12/bewilderment-new-poems-and-translations-by-david-ferry/
http://therumpus.net/2012/12/bewilderment-new-poems-and-translations-by-david-ferry/#commentsFri, 14 Dec 2012 15:00:17 +0000http://therumpus.net/?p=108832David Ferry’s Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations is a necessary book. I was sad when I finished it, and hungry to return and re-read. Still, the phrase “poems and translations” seems unfortunate. In Bewilderment, the two genres – the writing of poetry, and the writing of translations of poetry – are so seamlessly intertwined, thematically and stylistically, that one is compelled to ask the question, What is the difference between poetry and translation?]]>David Ferry’s Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations is a necessary book. I was sad when I finished it, and hungry to return and re-read. Still, the phrase “poems and translations” seems unfortunate. In Bewilderment, the two genres – the writing of poetry, and the writing of translations of poetry – are so seamlessly intertwined, thematically and stylistically, that one is compelled to ask the question, What is the difference between poetry and translation?

Aren’t poems just translations of commentary on other poems? And aren’t translations mostly forms of commentary on past translations, as well as upon the “original” poem (itself a translation)? If so, is there a difference between poetry and translation? In Ferry’s hands, the answer appears to be “no,” as his genres feel as permeable as “alterations in the light of the sun on the water.”

Translation is a central theme in Bewilderment – the translation of text into text, or grief into text; text into bewilderment, or bewilderment into translation. The book proceeds through juxtaposition, itself a form of commentary, whereby lucid renderings of Horace, Virgil, Catullus, Rilke, Montale and Cavafy are set against more “personal” meditations, often woven together with thematic and stylistic content from the prior translation, “prior” in the sense of space and time – anterior to historically, and anterior in terms of the location in the book. In the process, the line between dream and wakefulness becomes blurred, as does the line between myth and reality. Ferry becomes a modern Orpheus, mourning his Eurydice, Anne Ferry, to whom the book is dedicated; a modern Abraham, bewildered by what God or fate can lead men and women to do, including the near-sacrifice of sons or prior poems; a modern Narcissus, faced with “the surface of a lonely pond iced over.”

How does Ferry achieve such compelling transfigurations, and what does translation have to do with the title of the book? We might start with the intriguing notion that “translation” and “bewilderment” share a common meaning – the former signifying, from the Online Etymology Dictionary, to “bring or carry over,” and the latter suggesting to “lure into the wilds.” Both words therefore connote an action involving a pulling into the unknown, whether that be death (an unreadable text) pulled into life, or the life of a person pulled by Death into non-being.

Bewilderment becomes automatically the preternatural and understandable reaction to the need for, achievement of, and process of translation. Thus we read the powerfully troubling, strangely humorous three sentences that comprise Ferry’s “Soul,”

What am I doing inside this old man’s body?I feel like I’m the insides of a lobster,All thought, and all digestion, and pornographicInquiry, and getting about, and bewilderment,And fear, avoidance of trouble, belief in what,God knows, vague memories of friends, and whatThey said last night, and seeing, outside of myself,From here inside myself, my waving clawsInconsequential, wavering, and my feelersPreternatural, trembling, with their amazingTroubling sensitivity to threat;And I’m aware of and embarrassed by my waysOf getting around, and my protective shell.Where is it that she I loved has gone, asThis cold sea water’s washing over my back?

Aging, too, Ferry seems to be saying, like life and death, is a constant pull into the unknown.

The strongest section of the book is part seven (the book has eight parts), in which Ferry’s mourning of the loss of his wife turns somewhat away from the humor of “Soul” (with a welcome detour in “The White Skunk”), to take on very serious, disturbing and heartbreaking implications in the opening two poems of that section, “Orpheus and Eurydice (From Virgil, Georgics IV)” and “Lake Water.” The translation of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth from Virgil is a tour de force, (I read it at 3am, working the midnight shift at a crisis center, though felt exhilarated rather than exhausted after finishing it), but “Lake Water” is even better. It begins with the poet commenting on strange weather (“It is a summer afternoon in October”). He is sitting on a wooden bench, looking “out across the plane of the lake, / Seeing the light shaking upon the water / As if it were a shimmering of heat.” These are very subtle lines, capturing a subtle perception, and the poem only improves from here, opening up beautifully to describe “Alterations in the light of the sun on the water, / Which becomes at once denser and more quietly / Excited, like a concentration of emotions”. The poem itself, in the third stanza, or “the surface of the page,” is compared to the lake water, “that takes back what is written on its surface.” Then we read, in the final six lines,

When, moments after she died, I looked into her face,It was as untelling as something natural,A lake, say, the surface of it unreadable,Its sources of meaning unfindable anymore.Her mouth was open as if she had something to say;But maybe my saying so is a figure of speech.

What a tremendous, terrible leap! Here Ferry’s themes of translation and bewilderment come marvelously, hauntingly together, in a climax of a poem that achieves an intensely calm apogee that is simultaneously a devastating anti-climax and nadir. Ferry does not need to tell us who “she” is; the careful reader will know he is referring to his Eurydice, his wife. Yet the moments after her death are “untelling,” a choice of word that is very telling, for it alludes instantly to trauma, the feeling of “I can’t tell anyone” or just “I’m not telling” that may follow a traumatic event. As Ferry reaches for a way to say somehow what he means, he translates his own bewilderment into speech, and the effect is shocking and heartbreaking.